The Wedge

Breaking the Modernist Monopoly on Science

by Phillip E. Johnson

The movement we now call the Wedge made its public debut at a conference of
scientists and philosophers held at Southern Methodist University in March 1992,
following the publication of my book Darwin on Trial. The conference
brought together as speakers some key Wedge figures, particularly Michael Behe,
Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, and myself. It also brought a team of influential
Darwinists, headed by Michael Ruse, to the table to discuss this proposition:
“Darwinism and neo-Darwinism as generally held in our society carry with
them an a priori commitment to metaphysical naturalism, which is essential
to making a convincing case on their behalf.” As I wrote in my introduction
to the first edition of the papers from that conference,

I do not think the issue was ever really confronted on this question. . . .
What the anti-Darwinists called metaphysical naturalism the Darwinists called
“science,” and they insisted that for science to cease being naturalistic
would be for it to cease being science. To put the matter in the simplest
possible terms, the Darwinist response to the question presented was not “No,
that is wrong, because the case for Darwinism can be made without assuming
a naturalistic perspective.” Instead, they answered “So what?
All that you are really saying is that Darwinism is science.”

That may seem a deadlock, but the amazing thing was that a respectable academic
gathering was convened to discuss so inherently subversive a proposition. I
was sure that in the long run discussions of that sort would be fatal for Darwinism
because they would reveal that the theory finds its justification in philosophy,
not evidence. Biologists have legitimate authority to tell us the facts that
they observe, in the field and in their laboratories. They have no authority
to tell the rest of us what metaphysical assumptions we must adopt. Once it
becomes clear that the Darwinian theory rests upon a dogmatic philosophy rather
than the weight of the evidence, the way will be open for dissenting opinions
to get a fair hearing. In a nutshell, that is the Wedge strategy. Now that several
years have passed and a new century is almost upon us, it is time to review
how the Wedge has grown and progressed, to evaluate how far we have come, and
to forecast what we expect to accomplish in the next decade. But first I need
to explain the intellectual background in more detail.

The Background

Most persons who have written about creation and evolution have assumed that
they were entering a debate over facts and evidence, and their objective accordingly
has been to state in detail what they consider to be the facts and to support
their conclusions with evidence. Darwinian evolutionary scientists assert confidently
that the Genesis account is mythology, that the earth is billions of years old,
that the first primitive living organism emerged from a chemical soup by some
combination of chance and chemical laws, and that life thereafter evolved to
its present diversity by natural means, guided by natural selection but not
by God. Theistic evolutionists defend basically the same account, adding that
the evolutionary process was sustained and guided by God in some manner that
cannot be detected by scientific investigation. Biblical creationists defend
the Genesis account, arguing that Darwinian evolution is bad or biased science
while differing among themselves about such important details as whether the
“days” of Genesis were twenty-four-hour periods or geological epochs,
and whether Noah’s flood was worldwide or local. The argument never goes
anywhere.

The Darwinists hold the dominant position in the sense that only their position
is taught in public education or promoted in the national media. Nevertheless,
they are frustrated and worried that so much resistance remains, especially
in North America. Scientists, educators, museum curators, and others have made
determined efforts to convince the public, but public opinion polls indicate
that the public isn’t getting the message. Over 40 percent of Americans
seem to be outright creationists, and most of the remainder say they believe
in God-guided evolution. Less than 10 percent express agreement with the orthodox
scientific doctrine that humans and all other living things evolved by a naturalistic
process in which God played no discernible part. These figures, from recent
polls, are practically unchanged from previous polls in the early 1980s. The
Darwinists hold a commanding power position for the time being, but they have
not convinced the masses. The situation is sufficiently precarious that in 1998
the National Academy of Sciences found it necessary to issue a guidebook on
Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science (hereafter
Guidebook) urging public school teachers to “teach evolution”—i.e.,
to promote the neo-Darwinian theory—regardless of local opposition.

By “teaching about evolution” the National Academy emphatically
does not mean that the teachers should inform students candidly about
why the subject is so controversial, and it especially does not want them to
make students aware of the dissenting arguments (except perhaps in caricatured
form, as presented by Darwinists like Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould). Instead,
the Guidebook encourages teachers to mollify the religious people
with vague reassurances that “religious faith and scientific knowledge,
which are both useful and important, are different,” and to deny that
there is any real controversy because “there is no debate within the scientific
community over whether evolution has occurred.” To make the controversy
disappear, the Guidebook defines evolution so broadly (“descent
with modification”) that it “occurs” every time a baby is
born. Who can deny that babies are born, and dogs are bred, or that the gene
pool is constantly being modified?

This strategy of trivializing the subject might be effective if the science
educators and their allies completely controlled the channels of communication,
but increasing numbers of high-school and college students come to the classroom
already knowing that there are reasonable grounds for dissent, advocated by
persons (such as the authors represented in this journal issue) with impressive
scientific and academic credentials. The best-informed students also know that
prominent writers like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Edward O. Wilson, and Daniel
Dennett promote atheism in the name of evolutionary science, with the apparent
approval of the scientific establishment. (Other authorities like Stephen Jay
Gould purport to be more friendly to “religious belief,” but only
on the condition that religious authorities stick to questions of moral values
and defer to science on all issues of fact.) When the National Academy dodges
all the tough questions with evasive platitudes, it effectively teaches independent-minded
students to regard the pronouncements of science educators with no more trust
than they regard political or commercial advertisements. Eventually the scientific
community will pay a high price for this campaign of prevarication.

The Two Models of “Science”

The science educators don’t want to be dishonest, but they don’t
know any other way to deal with people who are so irrational as to deny that
our existence is best explained by evolution. The educators also think that
they are giving as much respect to religious belief as they honestly can, and
that to be more explicit on the subject would merely cause unnecessary offense
and provoke emotional opposition. In consequence, they assume that an honest
dialogue is impossible, and so they see no alternative but to counter the opposition
with tactics of intimidation, evasion, and propaganda. Similarly, dissenters
from evolutionary orthodoxy are often astonished that so many scientists cannot
see that there is a genuine scientific case against Darwinism, and that widespread
dissent cannot be dismissed out of hand as the product of ignorance or prejudice.
Why can’t eminent scientists seem to grasp the obvious point that finch-beak
variation does not even remotely illustrate a process capable of making birds
in the first place?

The reason for this deadlock is quite simple. In our culture there are two
distinct models of the scientific enterprise, and the persuasiveness of the
case for Darwinian evolution depends entirely on which model you adopt.

In the first, materialist model, science is seen as based by definition
upon philosophical naturalism or materialism. For present purposes naturalism
and materialism amount to the same thing. The first asserts that nature is all
there is, while the second adds that nature is made up of matter, i.e., the
particles that physicists study, and nothing else. (Philosophers tend
to prefer the less familiar term physicalism, because it avoids the
ordinary-language distinction between matter and energy—energy being also
a physical entity.) Whichever term is used, every event or phenomenon is conclusively
presumed to have a material cause, at least after the ultimate beginning. Within
this first model, to postulate a non-material cause—such as an unevolved
intelligence or vital force—for any event is to depart altogether from
science and enter the territory of religion. For scientific materialists,
this is equivalent to departing from objective reality into subjective belief.
What we call intelligent design in biology is by this definition inherently
antithetical to science, and so there cannot conceivably be evidence for it.

The second, or empirical model defines science strictly in terms
of accepted procedures for testing hypotheses, such as repeatable experiments.
(I use the term “empirical” here in its dictionary sense of “arising
from observation or experiment”—as opposed to arising by deductive
reasoning from philosophical axioms.) Of course scientific materialists also
employ these testing procedures, but only up to the point where materialism
itself comes into question. For true empiricists, whatever is testable by scientific
methods is eligible for consideration. Within science one cannot argue for supernatural
creation (or anything else) on the basis of ancient traditions or mystical experiences,
but one can present evidence that unintelligent material causes were not adequate
to do the work of biological creation. Whether some phenomenon could have been
produced by unintelligent material causes, or whether an intelligent cause must
be postulated, is eligible for investigation whether the phenomenon in question
is a possible prehistoric artifact, a radio signal from space, or a biological
cell.

If you adopt the materialist model, a materialistic evolutionary process that
is at least roughly like neo-Darwinism follows as a matter of deductive logic,
regardless of the evidence. Otherwise, how could complex organisms exist? To
say that they are the product of design by an unevolved intelligence, even one
that works by guiding evolution, would be to repudiate materialism and hence
to abandon science. Before life, especially intelligent life, can come into
existence, it must evolve from unintelligent matter by a naturalistic mechanism
that must by definition be unintelligent. That mechanism must employ some combination
of random variation and physical law (the principle of natural selection being
a sort of law), because nothing else could have been available.

This kind of deductive reasoning is so overpowering to materialists that Darwinists
sometimes say that their theory is as self-evidently true as the basic principles
of arithmetic. Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald exemplifies this Darwinian
logic: “Darwin only had a couple of basic tenets. . . .
You have heritable variation, and you’ve got differences in survival and
reproduction among the variants. That’s the beauty of it. It has to be
true—it’s like arithmetic. And if there is life on other planets,
natural selection has to be the fundamental organizing principle there, too.”
(Jill Cooper, “A New Germ Theory,” The Atlantic, February
1999.) The fallacy here is that from the proposition “heritable variation
and differential survival occur,” it does not follow that these factors
have any substantial creative power.

Scientific empiricists, as I use the term, hold that there are three
kinds of causes to be considered rather than only two. Besides chance and law,
there is also agency, which implies intelligence. Intelligence is not an occult
entity, but a familiar aspect of everyday life and scientific practice. No one
denies that such common technological artifacts as computers and automobiles
are the product of intelligence, nor does anyone claim that this fact removes
them from the territory of science and into that of religion.

It is also common in scientific practice to infer the existence of something
that is not observable (cold dark matter, extinct ancestors that were not fossilized)
because it is thought necessary to explain the phenomena that are
observable. For example Carl Sagan’s SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence) radio telescopes search the sky for evidence of radio signals
from space aliens. If they were to receive a signal containing a sequence of
prime numbers, as portrayed in the movie Contact, they would conclude
that it came from intelligent beings—without the need for independent
evidence of the existence and nature of the aliens.

Evidence of intelligent design is permissible in such cases because it does
not conflict with materialist metaphysics, the aliens being presumed to have
evolved by natural selection. The proposition that the biological cell is the
work of intelligence is out of the question for materialists not because of
the evidence but because—in the words of famed Harvard University geneticist
Richard Lewontin—“[our] materialism is absolute, we cannot allow
a Divine Foot in the door.”

The confusion between these two models sets the stage for an unproductive
argument that can never go anywhere. Scientific materialists think that advocates
of intelligent design (ID) are either irrational or dishonest, because they
are advocating as science a proposition that ought to be confined
to religion, namely the claim that scientific evidence points to the
reality of a designing intelligence in the origin and development of life. Moreover
they claim to have positive evidence for intelligent design in biology when
the rules of science-as-materialism specify that such a thing cannot exist.
Materialists classify such people not as empiricists but as “creationists,”
a term that in materialist jargon means biblical literalism and is
inherently pejorative, suggesting a combination of irrationality and intellectual
dishonesty. Hence materialists insist that “creationism,” including
any consideration of ID, must be banned from scientific discussions, and even
from public discourse altogether, as a reprehensible and unconstitutional attempt
to pass off religion as science.

We who are willing to consider evidence for ID, on the other hand, think of
ourselves as the true empiricists and hence the true practitioners of scientific
thinking. From our standpoint it is the materialists who are the “fundamentalists,”
in the pejorative sense of the term, because they adhere to a metaphysical dogma
in the teeth of contrary scientific evidence. If design is a legitimate subject
for scientific investigation in the case of computers, communications from space
aliens, and peculiar markings on cave walls, why should it be arbitrarily excluded
from consideration when dealing with the biological cell or the conscious mind?
Whether the evidence actually does support design hypotheses in biology is a
point in dispute, of course, but in our opinion the scientific materialists
effectively concede the point when they adamantly refuse to admit a distinction
between “materialism” and “science.” They must realize
at some level that they cannot win the argument on the basis of evidence, and
therefore must win it by imposing a definition of science that disqualifies
their critics regardless of the evidence.

Two Examples from the National Academy of Sciences

The policy of supporting Darwinism and materialism leads science educators
to present the subject in a manner that actively discourages students from cultivating
the critical thinking skills that are essential in real scientific research.
Students are also never prepared to understand public controversies over subjects
like social Darwinism and genetic determinism because the educators present
a whitewashed version of their theory. I’ll give two illustrations, both
involving the National Academy’s Guidebook. I choose this particular
text as an example because it is simple, recent and has the official imprimatur
of the nation’s most prestigious scientific organization. Similar confusions
abound in the literature of evolution at every level.

On page 19, the Guidebook describes one of the most frequently cited
examples of natural selection, in a section titled “Ongoing Evolution
Among Darwin’s Finches.” Here is the complete text:

A particularly interesting example of contemporary evolution involves the
13 species of finches studied by Darwin on the Galapagos Islands, now known
as Darwin’s finches. A research group led by Peter and Rosemary Grant
of Princeton University has shown that a single year of drought on the islands
can drive evolutionary changes in the finches. Drought diminishes supplies
of easily cracked nuts but permits the survival of plants that produce larger,
tougher nuts. Drought thus favors birds with strong, wide beaks that can break
these tougher seeds, producing populations of birds with these traits. The
Grants have estimated that if droughts occur about once every 10 years on
the islands, a new species of finch might arise in only about 200 years.

A good science teacher might employ humor to illustrate the fallacy of extrapolation
here. “If the average length of finch beaks in a population increases
five per cent following drought years, and droughts occur every ten years, how
long will it take the beaks to grow from an average of one inch in length to
ten feet, or for finches to become eagles?” It is no wonder that the
Guidebook’s authors did not quote the title of the Grant’s
1987 paper in Nature, “Oscillating Selection in Darwin’s
Finches,” because that would have signaled to teachers, and perhaps also
to bright students, that the finch-beak example involves no continuing directional
change at all. The drought year in question was followed a few years later by
floods, and the average beak size promptly went back to normal. But even if
finches did grow steadily larger for a time, would this show that they can change
into something completely different?

This example is not taken out of context, nor is it atypical. It follows the
thesis of The Beak of the Finch, by Jonathan Weiner, a book that won
the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 and has been enthusiastically recommended to the
public by leading authorities, including the president of the National Academy
of Sciences. It is easy to see why the Darwinists feel they have to present
evidence in a selective and slanted manner. Under any kind of objective analysis,
it would become apparent that the Darwinists have never discovered a mechanism
capable of creating new complex organs, or changing one kind of body plan into
another. (The finch-beak example is given top billing in the textbooks precisely
because the other known examples of observed natural selection are even less
impressive.) The Darwinist educators are determined to persuade rather than
to educate, and so their textbooks have to bluff.

If a stock promoter drafted a prospectus the way the Guidebook presents
the finch-beak story, by padding assets and concealing liabilities, purchasers
would be entitled to recover damages for fraud and the promoter might go to
jail. Yet scientific materialists do not consider such presentations to be dishonest,
for the same reason that they do not consider it dishonest to omit from the
high-school textbooks (as they do) any mention of the sudden and mysterious
appearance of the animal phyla in the Cambrian explosion. Specific evidentiary
problems can’t be all that serious, they reason, since some materialist
process has to have done all the creating regardless of the evidence. If the
mechanism that produced the Cambrian explosion is not yet fully understood,
this is a problem for advanced researchers. Students can’t be taught everything
at once, and to avoid encouraging them in unsound ways of thinking it is best
not to make them aware of the kind of evidence that causes people to form doubts.

I could give many other examples of how Darwinian educational materials present
scientific evidence selectively or misleadingly, but for my second example I
would rather discuss an important sin of omission. Readers today are virtually
assaulted with books by eminent scientific authorities presenting a materialist
and determinist worldview in the name of science. The Harvard zoologist Edward
Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience argues that not only scientists
but also theologians and literary scholars should base their work strictly on
Darwinian assumptions. Philosopher Daniel Dennett describes Darwin’s theory
as a “universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept
and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world view.” (The view that God
is a valid source of moral standards is one of those traditional concepts that
Darwin’s theory eats through, notwithstanding the vague reassurances science
educators provide for religious parents.)

Influential evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker and Robert Wright
describe human behavior as the product of genetic programs honed by natural
selection, while eminent evolutionists of the political left, such as Stephen
Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, describe evolutionary psychology as a pseudoscience
honed by prejudice. Molecular geneticists propose projects to alter the human
genome, at first to eliminate specific genetic defects and then eventually to
improve the species overall. They see no reason to respect the existing design
of an organism that was produced by unintelligent mechanisms that could hardly
be expected to do the job right.

Behind all the specific controversies lies one important question that the
educators systematically evade. Are evolutionary and materialist assumptions
merely a convention of scientific investigation, or are they valid for all purposes?
When science educators are trying to justify excluding non-materialistic thoughts
from the science curriculum, they tend to portray science as merely “one
way of knowing,” with the implication that other ways of knowing are equally
valid. When you press them to specify which other ways of knowing
are as valid as science, they can’t think of any examples. It turns out
that what they really mean is that science is the only way of knowing,
and outside of science there are only subjective beliefs and feelings. A typical
comment is that one can “feel” a sense of awe or beauty towards
some object like the rainbow, even though we know through scientific investigation
how the color spectrum is produced. Religious “faith,” aesthetic
“feelings,” and moral “beliefs” are continually contrasted
with scientific “knowledge,” a division that assumes that only science
provides truths that are valid for everybody.

For those who think that science is the only path to knowledge, and there
are many such in the National Academy, it is important to extend the realm of
science as far as possible to avoid a complete relativism on all subjects involving
any question of value. This explains why pseudoscientific fads such as behaviorism,
Freudianism, Marxism, and social Darwinism tend to gain so much influence, and
to reappear in new guises every time they are discredited. It also explains
why thinkers who don’t claim scientific authority tend to teach that
all knowledge is relative to particular interpretive communities. When
only science is deemed capable of creating knowledge, ambitious worldview-proclaimers
will either style themselves as scientists, or say that their nihilism is itself
an inevitable consequence of scientific knowledge. Is it true that
science is the only way of gaining objective knowledge, and that outside of
science there is only subjective faith and belief? That is the message the National
Academy apparently wishes to convey, but it does so by persistent insinuation
rather than explicit statement in order to maintain the pose of neutrality towards
“religious belief.”

The Right Question

In short, our scientific leadership is in a philosophical muddle and is only
making things worse with its campaign of intimidation, factual misrepresentation,
and semantic legerdemain. To put things on a more rational basis, the first
thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion. Too many
people, including journalists, have seen the movie Inherit the Wind
and have become convinced that everyone who questions Darwinism must want to
remove the microscopes and textbooks from the biology classrooms and just read
the book of Genesis to the students. It is vital not to give any encouragement
to this prejudice, and to keep the discussion strictly on the scientific evidence
and the philosophical assumptions. This is not to say that the biblical issues
are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after
we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact.

The question for now is not whether the vast claims of Darwinian evolution
conflict with Genesis, but whether they conflict with the evidence of biology.
To make that question visible, it is necessary to distinguish between the dictates
of materialist philosophy and the inferences that one might legitimately draw
from the evidence in the absence of a materialist bias. So I put this simple
question to the Darwinian establishment: What should we do if empirical
evidence and materialist philosophy are going in different directions? Suppose,
for example, that the evidence suggests that intelligent causes were involved
in biological creation. Should we follow the evidence or the philosophy?

Scientific materialists find that question impossible to answer, or even to
comprehend, because they identify materialism not only with science, but also
with rationality itself. In their minds the only alternative to materialism
is a chaotic animism in which science is impossible because all events occur
at the whim of capricious spirits, a world in which every question about causation
can be answered with a shrug and the remark “it must be the will of God.”
This is nonsense, of course. The very idea of natural laws stems from the concept
that the world is ruled by a rational lawgiver, just as it is a historical fact
that modern science grew out of a worldview guided by biblical theism. One of
the absurdities of materialism is that it assumes that the world can be rationally
comprehensible only if it is entirely the product of irrational, unguided mechanisms.
Another absurdity is that the scientific mind itself was designed by natural
selection, a force that rewards only superiority at reproduction and by whose
standards the mind of the cockroach is every bit as effective as the mind of
Einstein. On the contrary, the rationality and reliability of the scientific
mind rests on the fact that the mind was designed in the image of the mind of
the Creator, who made both the laws and our capacity to understand them.

Diehard materialists will never agree that there can be a contradiction between
the findings of empirical science and the dictates of materialist philosophy,
but more open-minded thinkers will grasp the possibility at once. To get the
necessary reconsideration going, the first priority for critics of scientific
materialism is to state the critique of materialism and naturalism in language
that the intellectual community can recognize as legitimate. In the world of
the university it is not legitimate to set up the Bible as authority against
the evidence of scientific observation, but it is very legitimate to show that
people who claim to be basing their ideology on observation or neutral reasoning
are actually proceeding on the basis of powerful hidden assumptions. It is also
legitimate to show that a specific scientific observation—such as the
finch-beak example—appears to be evidence that natural selection has creative
power only if you interpret the evidence with a powerful materialist bias.

The Wedge Strategy

This is where the Wedge comes in. To get the intellectual world discussing
a new and possibly unwelcome question, it is not enough just to write a book
or make an argument. We have to inspire a lot of people to start doing intellectual
work based on the right questions, work of such high quality and persuasive
force that the world cannot avoid discussing it. These thinkers have to produce
books and articles that explore in detail what happens when you call materialism
into question rather than take it for granted. As the discussion proceeds, the
intellectual world will become gradually accustomed to treating materialism
and naturalism as subjects to be analyzed and debated, rather than as tacit
foundational assumptions that can never be criticized. Eventually the answer
to our prime question will become too obvious to be in doubt. When the philosophy
conflicts with the evidence, real scientists follow the evidence. It will be
equally obvious that thinkers outside of science should not allow scientists
to abuse their proper authority by forcing dubious philosophical assumptions
on the rest of the world. The answers will take care of themselves once the
discussion is directed to the right questions.

The metaphor of the Wedge portrays the modernist scientific and intellectual
world, with its materialist assumptions, as a thick and seemingly impenetrable
log. Such a log can be split wide open, however, if you can find a crack and
pound the sharp edge of a wedge into it. There are a number of inviting cracks
in modernism, but probably the most important one involves its creation story,
and the huge gap between the materialist and empiricist definitions of science.
My own writing and speaking represents the sharp edge of the Wedge. I make the
first penetration, seeking always only to legitimate a line of inquiry rather
than to win a debate, measuring success by the number of significant thinkers
I draw into the discussion rather than by the conclusions that they draw for
the present.

There are some very gifted people following me into the gradually widening
opening, taking the discussion to levels I could never reach by myself. The
first and most famous example is Michael Behe. I explained in layman’s
terms why the Darwinian mechanism can’t do what it has to do, and Behe
explained in scientific terms exactly what that means when you understand how
biology operates at the molecular level. Behe’s book Darwin’s
Black Box has sold a lot of copies and received a lot of reviews. The reviewers
say what I knew they would say: Behe’s scientific description is accurate,
but his thesis is unacceptable because it points to a conclusion that materialists
are determined to avoid. Of course, the reviewers tend to be philosophically
naive souls who mix the two models up in their minds. They think that sticking
to the evidence means sticking to materialism regardless of the evidence. That
kind of logic may satisfy those who are highly prejudiced in favor of materialism,
but it will not work with those who are inclined to doubt.

After Behe comes William Dembski, with his remorselessly rigorous The
Design Inference. Dembski’s philosophical and mathematical reasoning
is highly sophisticated, but his fundamental proposition is pure common sense.
It is that intelligent causes can do things that unintelligent causes cannot
do, and scientific investigation can tell the difference. I attended a seminar
on Dembski’s ideas recently at a major university philosophy department,
where I saw from the reactions how common it is for clever people to deploy
their mental agility in the service of obscurity. But Dembski put the concept
of intelligent design on their mental maps, and eventually they will get used
to it.

After Dembski come a lot more. My sense is that the battle against the Darwinian
mechanism has already been won at the intellectual level, although not at the
political level. When I debate Darwinists, they rarely try to defend examples
like finch-beak variation as showing a mechanism that can really create complex
genetic information or the sort of molecular mechanisms that Behe’s book
describes. Instead, they shift the burden of proof to the skeptics, arguing
that the mere fact we don’t have a satisfactory mechanism for now doesn’t
necessarily mean that one will not be discovered at some time in the future.
(For reasons previously explained, scientific materialists consider the promise
of a materialist mechanism in the future to be equivalent to the demonstration
of a mechanism in the present. If the whole system is as true as arithmetic,
the missing mechanism will inevitably be discovered.) When they are on the defensive,
Darwinists frequently dismiss the mechanism as a mere detail, insisting that
all scientists are agreed that “evolution is a fact,” even though
they may disagree about exactly how it occurred. Evolution without a specific
mechanism is too vague to be testable. The theory claims, for example, that
an ancestral bacterium produced distant descendants as diverse as the worm and
the lobster. How can one test such an ambitious claim if no details of the transformation
are specified?

When the claim that large-scale evolutionary changes occur is made specific,
then it becomes testable. So far the claim is failing the tests. Wedge members
Paul Nelson and Jonathan Wells have shown this by describing the dissimilarity
of supposed evolutionary cousins at the earlier embryonic stages, and by reviewing
the literature describing attempts by biologists to change the direction of
embryonic development by inducing mutations in the DNA. What the results show
is that mutations either have no effect on the developing embryo or they have
a damaging effect, leading to death or birth defects unless the developmental
repair mechanisms can fix the damage. What mutations never do is to change the
direction of development, as would have to happen if evolutionary transformation
were to occur. To put it simply, you may believe on philosophical grounds that
large-scale evolutionary transformations must have occurred, but this belief
finds no support in the experimental evidence. If they did occur, no one knows
how.

The Future

Persons who consider only the cultural power of evolutionary naturalism and
see how thoroughly it dominates the contemporary mind, may suppose that the
Wedge’s critique of scientific materialism is a quixotic venture that
can never succeed. On the contrary, I think our success is all but inevitable.
In arguing that we should distinguish between objective empirical testing on
the one hand and deductive reasoning from materialist philosophical assumptions
on the other, we are making a point of elementary logic that is irresistible
once it is understood. The only obstacle to a breakthrough is the longstanding
prejudice, so deeply ingrained in educational practice, which says that materialism
and science are the same thing, and that there cannot be evidence of design
in biology because materialist prejudice forbids it. A prejudice like that can
be protected for a while, but in the end reason always breaks through.

I measure our success in two ways. First, many thousands of high-school and
college students are reading our literature, and are responding very favorably.
As they learn that the official textbooks present the evidence selectively,
and even distort it in the manner illustrated by the finch-beak example, many
become highly motivated to challenge the dogmatic system that is being foisted
on them. The most talented of these will be the Wedge members of the future.
Second, the Darwinists are completely unable to meet our challenge at the intellectual
level, and scarcely try. Their literature continues to promote the view that
the only dissenters from Darwinism are religious fundamentalists who don’t
know about the overwhelming evidence that proves that “evolution has occurred.”
This caricature of the opposition works only with people who have never heard
the dissenting arguments firsthand. With the growth of private schooling (including
home schooling) and the Internet, it is no longer as easy as it was for educators
to ensure that students hear only the official version of the story. Once independent-thinking
young people have read the dissenting literature, they are not likely to be
impressed with the evasive statements of the Darwinist establishment.

Success for the Wedge does not mean replacing one dogmatic system with another.
Our objective is not to impose a solution, but to open the most important areas
of intellectual inquiry to fresh thinking. If the fall of Darwinism inspires
materialists to develop a new theory that can survive unbiased scientific testing,
then so be it. If they can’t do that, then the world will face the astonishing
truth that the evidence of biology actually supports the popular belief
that living organisms are the product of an intelligent creator rather than
a blind material force. When that realization sinks in, the next big project
on the intellectual agenda will be to understand why so many brilliant people
fooled themselves so completely for so long. Exploring that question will make
the twenty-first century a very exciting time.

Two Key Terms

Darwinism: Living things originate through
descent with modification (descent means descent from one or
a few primitive ancestral forms; modification means natural
selection of random variations).

Neo-Darwinism: Same as above, but with the
process of modification cast in genetic terms (genetic mutations are the
source of variations, and natural selection produces changes in gene frequencies).

The Peppered Moth Story

The National Academy’s Guidebook ignores the standard
textbook example of evolution by natural selection, the peppered moths
of the English midland forests. This moth population was predominantly
light-colored in the early nineteenth century, and then became predominantly
dark during the late nineteenth century. According to the textbook story,
the moths rest during the day on tree trunks and are eaten there by birds.
While the tree trunks were light-colored, the light moths were better
camouflaged, but the dark moths had the advantage after the trunks became
dark due to the effects of industrial pollution. The light moths made
a comeback after the advent of air pollution control laws in the 1950s.

Even taken at face value, the moth story (like the finch-beak story)
involves no innovation or directional change. Discoveries in the 1980s
showed, moreover, that the moths do not normally rest on tree trunks.
All textbook photographs of peppered moths on tree trunks were produced
either by manually positioning live moths (which are torpid during the
day) or by gluing dead moths to tree trunks. The textbook story is now
thoroughly discredited, and its continued use shows how desperate Darwinists
are to provide confirmation for their cherished theory. See Coyne, “Not
Black and White,” Nature, vol. 396, pp. 35–36 (1998).

Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.

“The Wedge” first appeared in the July/August 1999 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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